THE question hanging in the air if the national stadium comes to Coventry is, what happens to the Sky Blues...?

THE question hanging in the air if the national stadium comes to Coventry is, what happens to the Sky Blues?

They have already sold Highfield Road in anticipation of building a new stadium on the Foleshill gasworks site.

If they play at a new national stadium on the same site, what would happen if they recover enough form to reach the FA Cup Final?

The "new Wembley" would be the obvious venue - yet football convention says no team should play such a match on their home turf.

John McGuigan, strategic director of city development, said: "We're absolutely clear we're not going to lose a big arena on this site. If we don't have a national arena, we're going to have a local one. We're trying to bring the two together."

On a practical level, the club could play in a larger 80,000-seater arena, twice the size of their own planned one, one solution being to screen off the upper tiers of seating so that the Sky Blues could play to the atmosphere of an apparently full stadium.

When asked about the possibility of an arena without the Sky Blues, Mr McGuigan at first said he didn't want to speculate.

When asked again if the national stadium could develop and not involve Arena 2001 - the Sky Blues' project - he said: "It could do but equally it could be their salvation."